Night White Skies

Sara M. Watson is a writer and technology critic. She is an affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and a writer in residence at Digital Asia Hub. Sara writes and speaks about emerging issues in the intersection of technology, culture, and society. She advocates for a constructive approach to technology criticism that not only critiques, but also offers alternatives. Her writing appears in The Atlantic, Wired, The Washington Post, Slate, Motherboard, and other publications.

This week is a conversation with Marcelyn Gow. Marcelyn is an architect and principle of Servo Los Angeles, She received her Architecture degrees from Architectural Association in London, Columbia University and her Doctorite from the ETH Zurich. Her Doctoral dissertation was called ‘Invisible Environment: Art, Architecture and a Systems Aesthetic’ which explored the relationship between aesthetic research and technological innovation.  She currently teaches design studios and critical theory seminars at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles.

Tom Wiscombe is Principal of Tom Wiscombe Architecture which is currently planning the Main Museum of Los Angeles Art with Developer Tom Gilmore in Downtown LA. As well as the West Hollywood Belltower on Sunset Blvd in Los Angeles. Wiscombe is Chair of the B.Arch Program at SCI-Arc, where he has taught for over 10 years.  Previously to all this, Tom worked for Coop Himmelb(l)au, where he was Chief Designer for BMW Welt, Munich, the Lyon Museum of Confluences, and the Dresden Cinema Center.

Madeline Schwartzman is a New York City writer, filmmaker and architect whose work explores human narratives and the human sensorium through social art, book writing, curating and video making. Her two books ‘See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception (Black Dog Publishing, London, 2011)—and Her forthcoming book See Yourself X: Human Futures Expanded (Black Dog September 2017) explores the future of the human head, using fashion, design and technology to speculate on how me might extend ourselves into space.

Sophia Roosth is the Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. We discuss her book 'Synthetic, How Life Got Made'.

Gareth Damian Martin is the creator and editor of Heterotopias, a project focusing on the spaces and architecture of virtual worlds. Heterotopias is both a digital zine and website, hosting studies and visual essays that dissect spaces of play, exploration, violence and ideology.

Kevin Warwick's research areas include artificial intelligence, robotics and biomedical engineering. Kevin Warwick is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Coventry University. Prior to that he was Professor of Cybernetics at The University of Reading, England. 

Oliver Morton is The Economist‘s briefings editor. Before coming to The Economist as energy and environment editor in 2009, he was the chief news and features editor of Nature, the international scientific journal. He is the author of ‘The Planet Remade, How Geoengineering Could Change the World’, “Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet”, a study of photosynthesis, its meanings and its implications, and “Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World”.

Jesse LeCavalier is a designer, writer, and educator whose work explores the architectural and urban implications of contemporary logistics. He is assistant professor of architecture at the New Jersey School of Architecture at NJIT and author of The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). LeCavalier was a recipient of the New Faculty Teaching Award from the Association of the Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) in 2015 and the 2010-11 Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan. His work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the New York State Council for the Arts, and the BMW Foundation. Recent publications include "Stuff During Logistics"  in, the Oslo Architecture Triennale catalog (Lars Mueller, 2016), as well as contributions to Infrastructure Space (Ruby Press, 2016), Smart City: Utopian Vision or False Dawn? (Routledge, 2016), Volume 47: Short Circuits, and Harvard Design Magazine 43. His essay, "The Restlessness of Objects,"

On this episode we discuss the architect Cedric Price and the influence of his work and strategies today. Molly Wright Steenson is a designer, writer, and international speaker whose work focuses on the intersection of design, architecture, and artificial intelligence. She is the author of the forthcoming book Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press, Fall 2017), which tells the radical history of AI’s impact on design and architecture and how it poured the foundation for contemporary digital design. A web pioneer since 1994, she’s worked at groundbreaking design studios, consultancies, and Fortune 500 companies for 23 years. Dr. Steenson is an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design and holds a PhD in architecture from Princeton University and a master’s in architectural history (M.E.D.) from Yale.

David Biello is an award-winning journalist who has been reporting on the environment and energy since 1999. He is currently the science curator for TED Talks and a contributing editor at Scientific American, where he has been writing since 2005. He also contributes frequently to the Los Angeles Review of Books, Yale e360, Nautilus, and Aeon, among other publications. Biello hosts the ongoing duPont-Columbia award-winning documentary Beyond the Light Switch as well as The Ethanol Effect for PBS. The Unnatural World is his first book.

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a designer, artist and writer, developing experimental approaches to imagine new roles and ideals for design. Designing objects, workshops, writing and curating, Daisy investigates design’s aesthetic and ethical futures with collaborators around the world including scientists, engineers, artists, designers, social scientists, galleries and industry. The Dream of Better, her PhD by practice at London's Royal College of Art, uses design to explore our idea of the 'better' future.   Daisy's expertise includes design and synthetic biology. She curated 'Synthetic Aesthetics' (Stanford University/University of Edinburgh, 2010–2013), an international research project between synthetic biology, art and design, and is lead author of Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature (MIT Press, 2014). She led the curatorial team for Grow Your Own… Life After Nature, a flagship Wellcome-funded exhibition about synthetic biology at Science Gallery, Dublin (October 2013–

Philippe Rahm is a Swiss architect, principal in the office of Philippe Rahm architectes, based in Paris, France. His work, which extends the field of architecture from the physiological to the meteorological, has received an international audience in the context of sustainability. 

James Hughes is a bioethicist and sociologist. He’s the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future.’ He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, where he also taught bioethics at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics.

Darran Anderson is the author of Imaginary Cities (Influx Press/University of Chicago Press) and the forthcoming Tidewrack (Vintage/Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He has also written the forthcoming e-book In Defence of Expressionist Architecture for Machine Books. He has written on the intersection of architecture and politics, technology, culture and futurism for the likes of The Guardian, Wired and Aeon. He has given talks on these issues at the LSE, the V&A, the Bartlett, the Bristol Festival of Ideas, the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Robin Boyd Foundation, Melbourne among others. He gave the 2016 keynote speech for the British  Council at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

David Gissen is the author of books, essays, exhibitions and experimental writings and projects about environments, landscapes, cities, and buildings from our time and the historical past. David is Professor of Architecture and Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts, a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University, and a visiting critic at numerous schools in the United States and Europe where he lectures and teaches in the areas of architecture, urban, and landscape history-theory, writing and design. At CCA, he co-directs the Experimental History Project and the MAAD HTX degree. 

Geoff Manaugh is the founder and author of the BLDGBLOG website. Manaugh is a former editor at Dwell magazine, former Editor-in-Chief at Gizmodo, and a contributing editor at Wired UK.   Manaugh is the editor of Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions. Most recently, he is the author of the book ‘A Burglars Guide to the City’ which is being adapted for television by CBS studios.  

"Is Climate an Architectural Design Problem?" Albert Pope is the Gus Sessions Wortham Professor of Architecture. He teaches in the school's Undergraduate and Graduate Program and is currently the director of the school’s Present/Future program.  Professor Pope holds degrees from SCI-Arc and Princeton, and taught at Yale University and SCI-Arc before coming to Rice. His design work has received numerous awards including national and regional awards by the American Institute of Architects as well as a design citation from Progressive Architecture. He is the recipient of numerous grants from a wide variety of funding agencies including the National Endowment for the Arts and the Shell Center for Sustainability. He is the author of the book-length study of the postwar American City, Ladders, recently reissued in a second edition (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997, 2015). Professor Pope has written and lectured extensively on the broad implications of post-war urban development. His current research addresses th

Bradley Cantrell is a landscape architect and scholar whose work focuses on the role of computation and media in environmental and ecological design. Professor Cantrell received his BSLA from the University of Kentucky and his MLA from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has held academic appointments at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, The Rhode Island School of Design, and the Louisiana State University Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture where he led the school as graduate coordinator and director.  Cantrell’s research and teaching focuses on digital film, simulation, and modeling techniques to represent landscape form, process, and phenomenology. His work in digital representation ranges from improving the workflow of digital media in the design process, to providing a methodology for deconstructing landscape through compositing and film editing techniques. His work in media has been recognized through a range of venues and has engaged both public and private clients.

Episode 009 is a brief and belated introduction about the 'Night White Skies' podcast discussing the shows ambitions and guests going forward.